Muddle over semantics or pressure from China? Collapsed spying case remains baffling
There is a baffling contradiction at the heart of the efforts of Dan Jarvis, the security minister, to explain why the prosecution of two Britons accused of spying for China collapsed last month.The problem, he insisted in front of MPs on Monday, was that “it was not the policy of a Conservative government to classify China as a threat to national security”.Except there is plenty of evidence to suggest that China was recognised as a threat by the previous governments in documents and public statements by ministers and officials.All this makes the failure of the government witness – Matthew Collins, the deputy national security adviser – to set this out in three separate witness statements given to the prosecution even more surprising.The context here is the ongoing fallout from the collapse of the prosecution of Christopher Cash, a parliamentary researcher, who was working for the Conservative MP Alicia Kearns at the time of his arrest, and his friend Christopher Berry, a researcher based in China.
Both were accused of spying for China under the 1911 Official Secrets Act because the alleged offences took place between late 2021 and early 2023, when that law was still in force.The archaic legislation, now replaced by the National Security Act, required Collins – as the government witness – to label China as an enemy, redefined after a court case in July 2024 as a “current threat to national security”.But it seems he did not do so to the satisfaction of the Crown Prosecution Service, not just in his original witness statement of December 2023 but again in February and July 2025.The formal explanation continues to be it was this failure that led to the CPS abandoning its case, a month before a trial was due to start.Jarvis, so keen to distance ministers and the prime minister’s national security adviser, Jonathan Powell, from the embarrassing episode, insisted that the content of the all important evidence was a “matter for the deputy national security adviser”.
Although Britain’s relationship with China will always be complex and cannot be reduced to a single word, as Jarvis tried to argue, the idea that Chinese actors were not threatening the UK between 2021 and 2023 is absurd,Kemi Badenoch, responding for the Conservatives, had plenty to aim at, starting with the same policy documents that the Labour minister had sought to offer in his defence,Jarvis cited Boris Johnson’s integrated review of defence and foreign policy published in March 2021, perhaps the best guide to the prevailing policy at the time of the alleged spying,The policy review described China as a “systemic challenge” but, as the Tory party leader was able to point out, also that it was the “biggest state-based threat to the UK’s economic security”,During this period, between August 2021 and October 2022, the Electoral Commission was hacked by Chinese actors, allowing the cyberattackers access to the electoral register of 40 million people.
When the Conservatives formally attributed the hack to Chinese actors, Rishi Sunak, then the prime minister, said China was “the greatest state-based challenge to our national security”.Against this backdrop it is unclear why Downing Street and Jarvis continue to focus on Conservative policy at the time of the alleged offences, when doing so continues to invite scepticism and further questions about whether pressure was discreetly applied on the civil servant to restrict his witness statements.There is no shortage of evidence that Labour, influenced by Powell, wants a closer relationship with China.An obvious solution would be to provide more information by releasing Collins’s three witness statements, redacting, if necessary, any unproven allegations against Cash and Berry.Jarvis did not rule this out on Monday, but said he could not release anything “which may still be used in any further ongoing legal processes”, with Lindsay Hoyle, the speaker, still pressing for a private prosecution.
This will need to be resolved.For now Labour has struggled to provide an explanation that will kill off suspicion that the government failed to supply prosecutors the information they needed to improve the climate with Beijing.If the collapse of the case really amounts to a muddle over semantics, seeing Collins’s evidence ought to help.
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